There were many things Aaron Swartz was working on, one of them is now available called Strong Box operable only on the Tor network. In light of the recent events of government surveillance of journalists and their sources (leaks, whistle blowers) we cannot find anything so on target to remedy the situation then what Aaron was working on just prior to his untimely death.

Why have I put a "Smoking Gun" in the title of the post? Because there were many things Aaron was working on that might not be known to the general public, this was one of them - and it was on a direct collision course with the surveillance state. In other words, because of the overreach of the prosecution there were many more facts about Aaron's ongoing work of other projects that are not known and how they influenced the off the chart persecution of Aaron Swartz (and a growing host of others). Words like "Tor - open-source - free - anonymous" should sting the ears of the corporate elite and their fawning franchise the surveillance government. I, of course, prefer the name DropDead to StrongBox, if you read my blog I am sure you can guess who I would prefer to tell to drop dead... With these things in mind here is the story (below) from The New Yorker:___________________

"Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous in-box. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act; his suicide in a Brooklyn apartment. I knew him as a programmer and an activist, a member of a fairly small tribe with the skills to turn ideas into code another word for action and the sensibility to understand instantly what I was looking for: a slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to communicate.

Aaron was attuned to this kind of problem. I’d first met him in 2006, when he and two other coders sold the social-news site Reddit to Condé Nast, the parent company of Wired, where I’m an editor, and of The New Yorker. The three of them moved into a converted conference room in the corner of Wired’s San Francisco headquarters. Aaron stood out from his colleagues he was moody, quiet, and blogged about how much he disliked working there.

Then, one Monday, he left the office to spend the day at a nearby federal courthouse where oral arguments were unfolding in Kahle v. Gonzales, a Constitutional copyright battle being waged by the law professor Lawrence Lessig. When he got back, he asked me, somewhat shyly, if he could write something for Wired about the proceedings. The resulting seven-hundred-word blog post was crisply written and clearly laid out the issues. I wondered about this young tech-startup founder who put his energy into the debate over corporate-friendly copyright term extensions. That, and his co-creation of an anonymity project called Tor2Web, is what I had in mind when I approached him with the secure-submission notion. He agreed to do it with the understanding that the code would be open=source licensed to allow anyone to use it freely when we launched the system.

He started coding immediately, while I set out to get the necessary servers and bandwidth at Condé Nast. The security model required that the system be under the company’s physical control, but with its own, segregated infrastructure. Requisitioning was involved. Executives had questions. Lawyers had more questions.

In October, 2011, Aaron came to the Wired office and we whiteboarded some of the details. In the intervening years, Aaron’s quiet withdrawal had shifted into a tentative confidence, his sullenness replaced by a disarming smile and a gentle generosity. Before he left, I walked him over to the new, much larger Reddit office next door. He stepped inside, looked around, and walked back out without anyone recognizing him.

By then, Aaron had been indicted for bulk downloading four million articles from JSTOR, an academic database, from M.I.T.’s public network, and the case must have been weighing on him. But he wouldn’t talk about it.

He lived in New York then, so my interactions with him from that point on were mostly electronic. The system, which we came to call DeadDrop, was a back-burner project for both of us, and Aaron had a lot of front burners. I learned his protocol: when he had the time to code, I could reach him on the phone or on Skype. We had long exchanges about security and features; Aaron rejected the ones he thought would overcomplicate the system individual crypto keys for every reporter at a news organization, for example.

In New York, a computer-security expert named James Dolan persuaded a trio of his industry colleagues to meet with Aaron to review the architecture and, later, the code. We wanted to be reasonably confident that the system wouldn’t be compromised, and that sources would be able to submit documents anonymously so that even the media outlets receiving the materials wouldn’t be able to tell the government where they came from. James wrote an obsessively detailed step-by-step security guide for organizations implementing the code. “He goes a little overboard,” Aaron said in an e-mail, “but maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

By December, 2012, Aaron’s code was stable, and a squishy launch date had been set. Then, on January 11th, he killed himself. In the immediate aftermath, it was hard to think of anything but the loss and pain of his death. A launch, like so many things, was secondary. His suicide also raised new questions: Who owned the code now? (Answer: he willed all his intellectual property to Sean Palmer, who gives the project his blessing.) Would his closest friends and his family approve of the launch proceeding? (His friend and executor, Alec Resnick, reports that they do.) The New Yorker, which has a long history of strong investigative work, emerged as the right first home for the system. The New Yorker’s version is called Strongbox; it went online this morning.

Nine days after Aaron’s death, his familiar Skype avatar popped up on my computer screen. Somewhere, somebody probably a family member had booted up his computer. I fought the irrational urge to click on the icon and resume our conversation. Then he vanished from my screen again."

ARISE (Bryan Cahall)Arise ye time‐keepers and ye payers of debt,to those gone before us and who haven't come yet.Arise or the moment shall pass to redeem the toil of the nameless, their forfeited dream.Arise all ye prayerful and unfold your hands,and place them flat firm on the soil of the land.Turn your eyes upward and if you must weep,ration your tears for your savior's asleep.Arise luchadores of centuries past,from your dusty page books and mass graves at last.Drown out the broadcast of silence and fear,sing through our voices who followed you here.Chorus:Dry your eyes, arise, arise.Dry your eyes, arise, arise.Arise all ye makers of profit and law,There is no second chance when your number gets called.The ones who possess all the power you seek, here in a language you no longer speak.Arise all ye soldiers and turn your guns round,upon those who laugh as they order you down,to stomp out the weak and to strangle the small,Arise and defend the most vulnerable.Arise all ye prisoners from your concrete hell,dissolve with one voice the walls of your cell.And when the warden asks how can this be?Reply we are human and must act accordingly.ChorusArise tall sequoia through suburban streetsTake with you the vinyl, the asphalt release,The birds from their cages and the kids from their tombsBreathe out the plastic air from their rooms.Arise ye young poets from irony's chains,from sarcasm prisons and transcendent claims.Arise and recall with what clearness you wrote,before you grew jaded before you grew cold.Chorus (x2)

They keep talking in the UK that the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) was damaged by malicious hacking - I have one question: If you have the SOCA (which could have been mistaken for SOPA...lol, where is the Non-Serious Crime Agency. Because it is not fair that the Serious one was damaged and not the Non-Serious One...LULZ!